Terms

"It was vital to have a way for our community to connect with one another," Katalina begins. "Some individuals will refer to their community' to refer to their Instagram following; maybe it's the two-way communication between the creator and their followers, but it's not an exchange between one member and an additional. We really wanted facilitate members speaking to one another since that's community building in the core. It's what makes people feel connected with each other."

There was more than just travelers becoming part of the ECT community. Industry experts were also joining and were actively sharing information with others, creating a welcoming and knowledgeable community. Katalina and members of the ECT team wanted to make formal these experts' contributions to acknowledge their appreciation for the information and advice that was available for sharing.

"We tried to bring these experts, who know our values and are basically the El Caminos of those countries, more engaged within our group," Katalina starts. "We created badges for them and also gave them profiles that have a blue circle surrounding their photo and a yellow check mark in order to prove they're destination experts. When you post a question about Greece and Christina responds, you know she is an expert that has had a minimum of ten years within the country."

The community members were asking questions, and real, experienced travel professionals were engaging. The community online was fulfilling it's purpose well -- maybe even more than what had been expected. Then, the miracle happened: lockdowns were lifted. Online ECT community was now returning to the offline world, and it was time for the company to shift from survival mode to developing to the future. "During the pandemic , we were fire-tested, and we proved resilient," Katalina explains.

The spread of the pandemic and global slowing allowed the ECT team to think further about the best way to provide for its women travellers. "We felt we were creating something truly special however, we didn't have the time or space to think bigger about the company we had built. We realized how valuable this is as a travel business generally," she continues. "As the world began to open up, we realized there was a lot more that we could accomplish with membership in real life. We could serve the community in a way that reflected what they were looking for from us, as they started to venture out to the outside world."

Big ambition

How is El Camino Travel going to offer its clients what they need, now that travel is almost returning to normal? "The big vision is to be the leading one-stop shop for women travelers to dream, plan, book, experience and document their journey," Katalina asserts.

ECT was founded with 100 members as of the end of August in 2020 and is now at around 700, and the ECT team has grown to 6 and a half full-time staff members. In the US women of the millennial generation represent the fastest-growing group within the travel industry, but Katalina feels that no one of the major operators are providing services to this group. "For many of the largest firms, there's no one in the boardroom saying, 'Hey, women spend an enormous amount of money yet they're not feeling safe when they travel. What can we do to improve their experience?" She adds.

Katalina recalls that, during a survey conducted recently of female travelers The top thing that travel businesses are requesting from the majority (85 percentage) of respondents, is simply to feel safe while travelling. "These women don't ask to have bodyguards on their property," says Katalina "They only want to be confident that they've got the information as well as the resources to make educated decisions. They feel empowered and feel safe. We're solving this right now with our small-group excursions, which allow guests to immerse themselves fully and not have to sacrifice the quality of their travel experience because of their gender."

The end goal is for Katalina to El Camino Travel to become the best resource available to female travelers. "TripAdvisor and Google concentrate on volume rather than quality. We've seen an abundance of poor quality information out there and we want to be completely different," she continues. "It's about knowing there's an online community to lean on in a way which I am not able to lean on any other community on my way out to discover the world."

Travel concierge

Just how does being able to draw on a community show up? Katalina says that when someone posts a query in the ECT forum, the community manager jumps into the discussion "with this concierge services" and will share all links to threads that might already be in existence. Then, at least five forum members respond. "Rather than the 200 responses that you get from the Facebook group for free you'll get better suggestions that reflect our style of traveling," she adds. "People have been paying for El Camino due to the belief that"I'm who I am as a person who travels; they have me covered better than everyone other'. We're bringing these people together."

This begs the question how to keep the level of quality, ECT has maybe an upper limit for number of members? "We receive inquiries all the time, 'How are you going to keep the quality up and maintain the quality?'" Katalina responds, by saying "Tech will contribute to that certainly. The team has already started monitoring data and evaluating the options." The team is looking into options to make sure that the users aren't bombarded with low quality information. The team is already moderating the forum, and chooses which topics to be answered, and stop the replies after an amount of time.

"At the moment, a advantage of joining is that you will receive an expertly curated travel guide every month. It's composed by our experts in destination So maybe we'll roll out more of our curated content as people are able to are awestruck by our services," she continues. "We would like to be sure we're able to handle more people and that we are able to provide them with the information and the connections they're looking for without being a victim of what happens as groups grow."

She notes that a lot of ECT community members want to communicate with one another, especially when they travel and a lot of them have remote workgroups at the moment. "You'll receive messages such as, 'Hey, who's currently in Mexico over the next couple of months? I'm on the road working remotely from Oaxaca!'" she explains. "We're exploring technology to make it easy for people to find each other whenever they're travelling to the same places around the same times."

Alongside the advancements in technology, the primary idea of ECT is to take on the post-lockdown world and get selling tours again. The company restarted selling group-travel trips again in June 2021, and the main part of their business is selling these trips, providing memberships as well as bundling them together by offering discounts to members.

Sharing is not selling.

In conclusion, however, and contrary to our expectations, the approach of not marketing travel- but simply talking about it on the ECT forum can have helped certain of the ECT's experts in travel in gaining clients. "The forum lets people display their expertise and thought leadership; many of the El Camino Travel community have been able to gain clients by the responses they provide to inquiries," Kataliana explains.

Katalina soon realized their were on to a good concept and sought ways to increase and improve the destination expert roster. "We talked to our present teammembers, "Who do we consider experts?' they suggested people to us," she continues. "I interviewed them and inform them about the forum, I would make them feel excited. This is a brand new channel of distribution that is free of all the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram, and gives the opportunity to be in front of their ideal audience."

Naturally these experts saw clear benefits. "When you talk to potential travel clients, you have showcase your experience, you have to show why would someone take a trip to you. This forum lets them present their knowledge in an natural and authentic manner that doesn't feel salesy," she says.

"Travel professionals love talking about travel. We enjoy sharing information. We have another chance to just be really helpful," Katalina muses. The simple act of being helpful is a great way to sell travel: as the industry has begun to recover, we as the ECT team has managed to do more beyond simply speaking about travel. "Since our lockdown ended, we've started planning trips together with our expert destination specialists. We did trips to Morocco and to Guatemala, through Greece in Greece, and Georgia. The trip was pretty awesome!" she smiles.